TRUE AND FALSE PROPHETS IN I KINGS, CHAP.

22

By REv. DEAN A. WALKER, PH.D.,

South West Harbor, Me.

THE terms "true" and " false," as applied to the prophets of

the Old Testament, serve to distinguish those whom the Bible
approves from those whom it does not approve. Yet few, it may
be, of those who use these terms in this general sense have con-
sidered the question wherein consists the trueness of the one
class and the falseness of the other. With many the readiest
answer would be that the false prophets were those whose pre-
dictions did not come to pass. Others would say that the false
prophets were those who were not commissioned of God to speak
for him. Still others would make the distinction to be that the
true prophets tried to teach the people the truth, while the false
prophets wilfully tried to deceive them.
To the people of Old Testament times this was not a ques-
tion of merely academic interest, but one of vital importance;
for these prophets were their contemporaries, to whom they had
to look for practical guidance in political and spiritual things.
They could not, as some champions of inspiration in these days
profess to be able to do, accept a " thus saith the Lord" as an
all-sufficient criterion of the true prophet, because they knew
that every claimant to the prophetic office in those times used
this same introductory formula (I Kings 22:1 I ; Jer. 23 : 30-40),
and that Moabite and Assyrian monarchs were quite as prone to
hear a divine calling in their own patriotic and personal inclina-
tions as any Hebrew king or prophet.
It is not strange, therefore, that we find in the Bible more
than one attempt to give the people some test by which they
might know the true prophet from the false. We read in Deut.
18 :21, 22: "And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know
the word which the Lord hath not spoken? When a prophet
speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor
272
 TRUE AND FALSE PROPHETS IN I KINGS 273

come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken:
the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously, thou shalt not be
afraid of him." Evidently, such a criterion is, at best, only a
negative one, and applies only when a prophet is willing to stake
his reputation on the fulfilment of a definite prediction. More-
over, if the prediction be ambiguous or its fulfilment be put far
into the future, it is of little use to a man wanting to know his
immediate duty. The form implies also, though not with abso-
lute necessity, the converse-that, if the thing come to pass, the
predicter may then be regarded as a true prophet. But, obvi-
ously, an impostor could hardly fail to hit right in some of his
shrewd guesses.
The Deuteronomist himself saw this and felt the need of
some further limitation in the test. Accordingly, in 13:1-3, he
gives this additional rule: "If there arise in the midst of thee
a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and he give thee a sign or a
wonder, and [read, even though] the sign or the wonder come to
pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other
gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; thou
shalt not hearken unto that prophet or that dreamer of dreams."
To the former test of clairvoyance there is here added an ethi-
cal one. The character and purpose of the would-be prophet
must be looked at in their relation to certain ultimate principles
of the divine law. If those principles were already embodied
in written form, we have here something closely parallel to the
appeal which the Protestant reformers made from the pope and
the councils to the Scriptures; and in the positiveness of it, it is
surpassed only by Paul's demand that, though he himself or an
angel from heaven should preach any other gospel than that which
he has already preached, let him be anathema (Gal. I :8). To the
ordinary mind, such an appeal from Paul future to Paul past
would be rather confusing; and to the man of Old Testament
times, if he reflected that the law was given by Moses, it might
have been equally difficult to choose between a prophet long
since dead and one who was now making predictions fulfilled
before his very eyes.
It is plain, however, that in substituting an ethical test for
274 THE BIBLICAL WORLD

mere success in prediction and miracle-working, the Deuterono-

mist has come to higher ground, and a time-honored law may
reasonably command greater respect than the claims of some
upstart prophet. Superior powers for wonder-working were valu-
able in ancient times as introductory credentials. Jesus himself
did not disdain to make use of them. But a right moral pur-
pose was a sine qua non of the true prophet.
Nevertheless, even a right moral purpose does not of itself
constitute a man a true prophet. Beyond this it is necessary
that he be correct in the great underlying premises of his
prophecies, and by the correctness of these must his work ulti-
mately stand or fall.
No better text for a study of such premises and purposes can
be found in the Bible than the chapter (I Kings, chap. 22) in which
the so-called false prophets encouraged Ahab to go up against
Ramoth-gilead. Judged by the outcome of the campaign, they
certainly were false prophets, and, by the same test, Micaiah
ben-Imlah was a true prophet. But it is hardly fair to let Micaiah
go down in history as a true prophet, and to condemn all the
other four hundred as false solely on the ground of their attitude
in the one and only incident in which they are known to us.
Why may it not have been a successful hit on Micaiah's part?
What reason have we to suppose that he was equally happy in
all his attempts to forecast the future? All else that we know
of him is what we have on Ahab's testimony (vs. 8), that
Micaiah had always been, like the proverbial Irishman, "agin the
government." As the party "in opposition," he must often, as
Ahab implies, have met the king's plans with prophecies of evil.
Yet Ahab throughout his reign had been what we would call,
from a political point of view, a successful man. He had bound
to himself by matrimonial alliance the king of Sidon; and by the
marriage of his daughter with the son of Jehoshaphat he had
ended the wars between Judah and Israel which previous dynas-
ties had kept alive since the disruption; and, in spite of the oppo-
sition and maledictions of certain of the Jehovah prophets, he
seemed in a fair way to secure a reunion of the two kingdoms
under a descendant of both David and Omri (2 Kings 8:18).
 TRUE AND FALSE PROPHETS IN I KINGS 275

He had been defeated by the Assyrians at Karkar, it is true, but,

what was of far more importance to him, he had been uniformly
successful against his nearer enemy, Ben-hadad of Syria, and
was able to command the tribute of Moab. It would seem that
Micaiah's predictions must often have been wide of the mark and
those of the four hundred successful. Moreover, the mass of the
people were so subservient to Ahab that he had been able to
transgress the ancient laws of landed inheritance with impunity.
What, now, were the grounds on which the four hundred
ventured to predict success at Ramoth-gilead ? We may reason-
ably believe them to have been such as the following:
i. There were some whose principle in predicting was to say
the agreeable thing whenever there was an even chance of its
proving correct.
2. There were those whose principle was to prophesy which-
ever way seemed likely to pay best in physical convenience.
They had no liking for a dungeon and a bread-and-water diet.
3. There were those who always made it a point to be found
in the majority. In this case, perhaps for reasons we shall con-
sider later, the majority was overwhelmingly in favor of the war.
4. Some, who otherwise would have condemned the project,
seeing that a large majority were in favor of it, and moved by
what is often considered a praiseworthy desire for harmony, voted
"to make it unanimous" (vs. I3). The above classes of men
have no claim to be called true prophets.
5. Some who at heart, perhaps, doubted the expediency of
the plan, saw that Ahab was bent on going anyway, and, believ-
ing that courage is half the battle, would do what they could to
give him this initial advantage. These were the opportunists.
They came nearer to being true prophets. They meant well and
tried to make the best of the situation.
6. There were those who favored the campaign from a sense
of justice. As the result of the last war, Ben-hadad had prom-
ised to give back to Ahab the cities that his father had taken
from Ahab's father (I Kings 20: 34). Ramoth-gilead was one
of these. But three years had now passed (22: 1), and Ben-
hadad had not yet complied with this item in the treaty. It was
276 THE BIBLICAL WORLD

time to use forcible measures. Those who agreed with the king
in this were the idealists. Let justice be done though the
heavens fall.
7. Finally, there were the philosophical theologians, consti-
tuting the responsible nucleus of the four hundred. They were
guided in their forecasts of the future by certain great principles
of divine providence, as they understood it, which constituted
their philosophy of life. Chief among these principles was one
that figures prominently in Old Testament thought: the belief
that righteousness has its reward in material and temporal pros-
perity, with its natural corollary that material prosperity is an
evidence of divine favor. Ahab, as we have noted above, had
been a successful man. According to this philosophy, therefore,
he was a favorite son of fortune, and there was no reason to sup-
pose that the divine favor was now to be withdrawn. " Nothing
succeeds like success," is our modern way of putting it. Ahab
could not but be successful. Go up, therefore, to Ramoth-gilead
and prosper.
Such were some of the grounds on which the four hundred
favored the king's purpose. And they were false prophets, not
because they intentionally advised the king contrary to his best
interests, nor because they falsely claimed to be inspired of God,
for the narrative itself regards them as in some sense his agents
in the affair; nor because the outcome was different from what
they predicted. But they were false prophets because the
grounds on which they made their predictions were false.
Why, on the other hand, should we call Micaiah a true
prophet? Not because this one of his many predictions came
true, nor because he alone prefaced his words with a " thus saith
the Lord," nor because he was more sincere in his belief as to
what the outcome would be. It was rather for this, that he had
got hold of a more correct and fundamental principle of divine
government than these others, namely that, notwithstanding all
appearances to the contrary, a righteous God cannot in the long
run favor a wicked man, and such a man Micaiah believed Ahab
to be. On this principle he had consistently predicted evil for
Ahab throughout his career. We do not know how often these
 TRUE AND FALSE PROPHETS IN I KINGS 277

predictions may have been defeated in specific cases before now.

We have shown that Ahab was in a measure justified by his past
successes in discrediting Micaiah's auguries of evil. But in the
long run Micaiah's principle, that a righteous God cannot favor
a wicked man, stands in the same class with the dictum of
Socrates, that " there can no evil befall a good man, whether he
be alive or dead." These are eternal principles of divine govern-
ment, and he who prophesies on these principles is a true prophet,
however remote or infrequent may be the fulfilments of his spe-
cific predictions.
Various ages and different social orders have had their several
principles of prophecy. The same half-truth, that temporal
prosperity betokens the favor of God, which drove Ahab to his
death at Ramoth-gilead, was the ground of that fatal enthusi-
asm under Jeroboam II. for a coming great day of Jehovah,
which the prophet Amos with truer foresight declared was to be
a day of darkness and not of light. Napoleon's working prin-
ciple was that God is on the side of the heaviest battalions, but
the heaviest battalions came unexpectedly upon a deep trench
in the field of Waterloo, and God was found to be on the other
side. The papist believes in the infallibility of councils; the
monarchist holds to the divine right of kings and that the king
can do no wrong; the democrat interprets the voice of the people
as the voice of God.
The prophets among us today are often divided on our great
political and social questions; some seek leadership from insin-
cere and selfish motives, but a great many on both sides are hon-
estly trying to promote righteousness. Time only can show
which of these latter are the true prophets; for, while the true
prophet must preach what he believes to be the truth, uninflu-
enced by any considerations of what will please others or profit
himself, and must accept no man's conscience as a substitute for
his own, and must be ready to go on a diet of bread and water
for a testimony to his sincerity-above and beyond all these, he
must have laid hold of the eternal principles of divine govern-
ment, and whole truths, not half-truths, must be the basis of his
preaching.